DEAR Support Team

20K SKU limit?!

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Whoopsie Daisy

started a topic
over 1 year ago

I was trying to get started with Dear to use for my physical store and Shopify website that have a shared inventory. Through the process I was told there is a 20,000 sku limit. We are just a small children's clothing boutique in a 1000 sq foot location, yet we go through about 15,000 sku's pre season. You guys are starting this new POS system which based on website images of the POS with displaying clothing items, and offering laybuy that you certainly want this to be used in the clothing industry. It seems like your maximum LIFETIME sku limit is a severe hindrance to what kind of clothing store could use your system. There is no way to delete sku's because they are used transactions and need to stay anyway for historical reporting.

It seems like any retail store that has seasonal inventory will not be able to use your system for very long before hitting 20,000 sku's

I don't know if raising the sku limit is considered a "feature" or not, but I would like to suggest that it be increased to a great extent and also a module for easily bulk deleting old products (maybe being able to sort by the last time they were sold). OR keeping them for reporting purposes but bulk mark them as inactive so that the system can just ignore them except for when someone is doing old history reports, that way they aren't a constant drain on the database.

I really want to try to use Dear but my initial import would be around 15,000 sku's (many of which are 0 qty) and I will be adding another 15,000 or so through July and August.

Thanks so much! I hope to be able to use Dear one day, its the only system that has specific functions related to Shopify that I need.

Jonathan Kropf

said
over 1 year ago

This is great to know. I wasn't aware of this limit and could prove problematic.

1 person likes this

W

Whoopsie Daisy

said
over 1 year ago

Jonathan, I was sprites as well, I felt like this info should be out in the open on the pricing table.
I just finished removing over 10k inactive sku's from my shopify so they don't import into Dear. But I will be lucky if I can get 2 full years our of Dear before I hit the limit and have to shop around all over again.
Hopefully they will change it to 20k active sku's or have a purge method that removes items from inventory but archives them to retain the financial data for reporting. This way I don't outgrow it in 2yrs (or less). 20k individual sku lifetime limit is very low for the apparel industry

1 person likes this

Valiantsina Zianishyna

said
over 1 year ago

I hope it will be possible to have over 20,000 SKUs in DEAR in the future. Meanwhile what you can consider to do if you approach the limit is to merge the SKUs that are no longer in use. For example you can create a generic product like "summer 2016 collection" and merge the old apparel so you could have space for your new collection. Merging will replace the old products with the primary product all across the board - in all the transactions like sales etc. So before merging the products you might want to export sales by product details report to backup this data.

W

Whoopsie Daisy

said
over 1 year ago

Thank you for the work around Valiantsina. The Dear support team did mention this too me as a work around, however I really would prefer not to do that because I believe it messes up the ability to run detailed reports. We like to run reports to see what brands and/or sizes sold best for similar periods in prior years. Wouldn't we loose that ability by merging products?
I know you mentioned exporting some reports to excel but it just wouldn't work for what we need because often we do this for unusual dates. Like if we want to run a sale this week we may look back at prior years to see what sold best last time we ran the same sale. So it's not always specific reports that we can create ahead of time.
Thanks!
Stephen

Valiantsina Zianishyna

said
over 1 year ago

That is correct, merging products will remove the ability to see the breakdown for those products in the reports. That is why you can create a sales report and add all the dates and all the additional fields you use - like categories, brands etc. So that you can use Excel tools to get the data you need from such export.

I know this is not an ideal solution but unfortunately it is the only solution I can think of at this moment.

J

Jonathan Kropf

said
over 1 year ago

This really isn't good enough. This limit needs to be increased and I don't see why it can't be.

J

Jonathan Kropf

said
over 1 year ago

We really need feedback on this from DEAR. 20K limit is ridiculous in an Inventory management system.

2 people like this

J

Jonathan Kropf

said
over 1 year ago

And silence on this topic as per most.

Christine Lee

said
over 1 year ago

We recently had a DEAR deployment where the client had 26,000 products, and only discovered this issue after importing the 21st CSV file during pre-deployment.

We ended up needing to agree on which parts to exclude for the time being, and imported 19,400 products, with any products not in the system to be created "on the fly".

They deal in automotive spare parts, for many of the parts, they may only order in as required, but because each part has a unique code pertaining to a particular make, model and year of car it is vital to have all of these items in the system to be able to be searched by staff and to provide information to customers.

They are planning on expanding their range to supply parts from other car brands, but with the 20,000 SKU limitation, there is no room for them to grow/expand. We understand there may be associated performance issues with a higher amount of SKUs, as the system is loading slower than normal with the 19,000 products in there already, but the current 20,000 SKU limit is very restrictive for some clients' needs.

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Jonathan Kropf

said
over 1 year ago

Yup... no one will get back to you though...had I known there was that limit, would have gone with something else and in a few months will likely have to, due to that limit.

J

Jonathan Kropf

said
about 1 year ago

And still no one from DEAR bothers to comment. We are 4 months in and on 13500 items already. Means we will likely have to move off in 4 months

Max - DEAR Systems

said
about 1 year ago

Hi All,
We have recently made some improvements which might allow us to remove the 20k SKU limit.
Still currently in testing phase and should the limit be increased we will notify you all asap.
Thank you